1. Arrive at the British Library for a day’s work researching 1700s musical performances. Have a sandwich and start browsing old newspaper clippings with nary a care in the world.

2. Discover, on the internet, that a serious bomb threat has been reported to Metropolitan police, claiming to target an unspecified time and place in central London.

3. Worry about this for a couple of minutes, but also kind of wonder just how cocky you have to be to warn the police that you’ve planted a bomb.

4. See that the bombers are Irish. Spend a few moments on Wikipedia reading up on various Irish armed movements and the demands they’ve traditionally made. Read further on all the chaos they’ve caused, and crack a nothing-a-Guinness-couldn’t-solve joke to a friend. Wonder why on earth they’ve decided to return; discover a depressing news story from a few weeks ago about a young police officer in Belfast murdered by a car bomb.

5. Decide that you can’t possibly be in danger at the Rare Books room of the British Library and work until 4 p.m.

6. Completely forget about the bomb scare on the Underground journey home, because the Irish Republicans have not quite worked out al-Qaeda’s tactic of targeting transportation networks. This is confirmed when you arrive home and read that the focus of police sweeps is the neighborhood around Buckingham Palace.

Because if anything can make the IRA's blood boil, it's this.

7. Let Mom know you’re back in your room and that nobody’s going to attack East London any time soon, or indeed ever, probably. Warm up some leftover curry from the night before and start writing.

8. By the next day, forget about the whole thing completely. See that the Queen is now in Ireland and assume that she’s probably a bigger target. Realize that it is exactly the Jaded London Local thing to do to dismiss this whole thing as one of those distractions inherent to living in The City. Confirm your flippancy about the whole thing by writing a blog post trivializing the whole affair, while at the same time realizing that you aren’t trivializing it because quite possibly the terrorists just wanted to make everyone nervous.